2022 EB5

[bigmasterdrago]

Here's a fun one. Fetch the osculating elements at horizons for a new temporary designation 2 meter rock called 2022 EB5. Or at https://www.minorplanetcenter.net/mpec/K22/K22EH8.html. Make sure to grab them a few days prior to now as this little rock splashed down north of Iceland ~21:23UTC today. Not found in MPC Today, MPC or JPL. Interesting to watch the track get highly perturbed as it enters the Earth/Moon system ~20:00UT. It was just discovered by a Hungarian observatory today at 00:48UT so only 20 hours b4 impact. Amazing stuff! Only a couple of other observatories made a few contributing astrometric observations b4 impact. The last one being at 2022 03 11.87033UT. There seems to be an image at https://www.projectpluto.com/temp/ds9_10.png
Should be some sonic detections coming soon.

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Infra-sound detection: https://twitter.com/pgbrown/status/15024...21377?s=21

[ledge1962]

Thanks BMD
I meant to take a quick look at the twitter site out of interest, but spent over 30minutes viewing it. A very good explanation on the 'Sound" testing

[PMSchu]

Here's what JPL's Small-Body DB has about it: [attachment=2296]

Interesting that it's not valid after 21:24UT on Mar 11. When did it hit?

Phil S.

[bigmasterdrago]

Best I can tell from software is 21:23:58. The last observation appears to have been at 20:59:40, so just 24 minutes and change before impact. That part of the world was cloudy and the seismic and sonic listening stations have inconclusive impact time estimates due to propagation path discrepancies.

[PMSchu]

It would be interesting to calculate the ephemeris using the geocentric option & the HORIZONS elements to see when the Re comes within one Re. That would indicate a collision. The MPC's NEAs at Today's Epoch didn't include 2022 EB5 in yesterday's download. Their orbital elements are for the standard epoch of 2022 Jan 21 0000 UT. When I calculated the ephemeris from Columbus using the MPC's standard epoch elements, I got a minimum Re of 4,477 km. 

A very interesting event for sure. It looks like the collision occurred around that time.

Phil S.

[bigmasterdrago]

You can use the recommended times at Horizons to fetch the osculating but the gravitational pull is so high. I could not replicate the track and collision location. The elements as you say are still at the standard epoch of 21 Jan and at the MPC and the Daily now. I used those and the original ones from first observation. Loaded a little vid of final minute of track into collision at correct impact location using gravity simulator specialty software. https://vimeo.com/687523301

I was able to do similar simulations in an old 8 bit software called Dance of the Planets in a galaxy far, far away in another time. Made a collision that I called Mars Kill. Dance will not run on modern operating systems.

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It was strange as I was unable to update as a single MP download but it was in a new fetch of the full MPCORB. Or do as I did previously, a Horizons Osculating near date of impact. Just for the sake of "playing around" with this dark Mini Cooper sized rock from space.

[ledge1962]

There is a fairly good dos emulator called DOSBOX that is reported to run the Dance of the planets software. WWW.DOSBOX.COM

[bigmasterdrago]

I tried DOSBOX a few years back but was unable to get it configured properly. Have forgotten so much since the mid 80s. LOL I can actually get Dance and MoonCalc to run in VM on my W7Pro64 machine but it was always a PIA. It was a lot of fun to create planetary collisions in Dance. I just need to acquire an old 486 laptop with DOS ;=]

[ledge1962]

I remember running DOS on a 286. It was slow, but we did not know any better. I read someone was using the dancing planets on dosbox, maybe they upgraded the emulator. I am surprised there isn't a more modern replacement program for dancing planets. Perhaps you should drop subtle hints to Greg

[bigmasterdrago]

LOL! I recall spending $400 on 4 chips (4Mb) of RAM. Black gold for my DX486.

I've been dropping not so subtle "hints" since I first began using version 3. Working with the NEA near passes was a huge PIA in the beginning, learning to fetch osculating elements from Horizons. I've become very fast at doing that now. It works very well. In the beginning of my pestering Greg, I had hoped it would work differently so all the user had to do was grab an element set for the rock at whatever epoch was available and go. Have the software run the n-body calcs to get an ephemeris as does Horizons or gravity simulator specialty software. Then easily print charts. Over the years I've become clever in the use of ST and sources like Horizons and JPL, MPC, etc have become much handier.

I also pestered Arc Scientific for years to make a Windows friendly version of Dance of the Planets. Their answer - just not worth the niche buyer payload. Same as Greg's take. Maybe 14 people take advantage of the osculating element import tool.